User Comments

B on Sep 10, 2006 at 02:59:05 said:

Reading this article and the last comment posted just makes me belive more and more that my opinion of the gov. is right. I don't believe in the gov. anymore b/c of situations I have seen occur to friends. As far as this whole immigration situation we are facing, I just think that they find exceptions for whoever they want. They don't follow their own laws and just use those immigrants to take tax payers money. The more they house them the more money they take. I don't think they care about anyone in there and they don't care about resolving their case....they just want to keep them in there as long as they can so they can take more taxes from taxpayers and at they end they will send the people who really want to work back to their countries and leave the lazy ones and criminals here....I've even heard of cases in which sexual predators were allowed to stay and others with kids here and wanting to do something with their life were sent back. At the end, it's their decision and they will do like always, what they want and our opinions, like U.S. citizens don't count.

M. C. on Aug 18, 2006 at 23:24:42 said:

It was another sunny day in Florida, but I was full of trepidation and fear that my dream of US residency was about to evaporate in the steamy sun. I was waiting for my third interview in less than one year with the Department of Immigration. As I waited, my thoughts wandered back to that day seven years ago when, full of hope and energy for a new life, I arrived in the United States, with my heart-set on making this my new home. I remembered my excitement and my fear in taking this giant step in my life. My native country was far behind me, and the heartbreak of family betrayal could begin to heal in this land of opportunity.

I spoke almost no English but in time I would learn, since after all, this would be my country, now. And so began the long and often frustrating day to day living and struggle to become one with this country. But, fate was not kind to me. The United States did not greet me with open arms; America was not moved by my commitment. And although I was just one-among millions of people like me who were aimlessly swimming around in a pool of hope mixed with despair, only a few would actually realize the blessing of the great Wizard of Oz and be accepted in the land. Legal vs. illegal. Stamp of acceptance or kick in the ass.

As I sat in the building that housed the Immigration Department I told myself over and over that this would be the day of my acceptance, and this would all be good, and worth it. I would celebrate tonight and kiss the floor of my home and thank my friends for being there for me through this ordeal. But, that was not to be. I sat there from 8:00 am until noon and then after waiting all morning, in less than five minutes, my fate was cemented, I was handcuffed, loaded in a waiting van. And in those minutes I was stripped of my dignity, my identity, my rights, my home, my friends, and ultimately my new country.

It seems that in most cases they already know that you’ll be taken into custody that very morning. They call you to the office with the pretense of sending you a “rescheduling appointment” letter, but when you get there, an ICE officer waits in the adjacent room, planning to apprehend you. A couple of ‘just-because’ questions from the officer, and one minute later you are handcuffed. They do not tell you your rights, so you only guess that you do not have any.

The proud Homeland Security officer gets their bonus, you can see the smile in their face. You just wonder if President Bush or somebody for him will call to compliment them. After all, they just followed the instructions, and soon enough they will finally become supervisor. It’s a career built on other people’s miseries.

The ICE officer drove me to his office, with a masochistic smiling face that reminded me over and over that I had just lost all rights in the U.S. He is making promises that he will not keep, including the one on how long I will be detained and the one to let me make a phone call to my family or friends once I will reach his office, (even serial killers in America have that right I believe). I told him three times that I speak perfect English, and we had over one hour conversation in English, though still he called his friend, a native of my country I guess, to have an over-the-phone translator. I know: he probably just wanted to tell his friend that for the first time he got a West European Citizen in his office, or maybe just to tell me that he has European friends.

The immigrant goes to the overcrowded and degrading ‘Krome Processing Centre’ or the ‘BTC’, the Broward Transitional Centre, and then after weeks, and sometimes months of reclusion he is usually deported. A Chinese guy, had skinned head in his detainee ID picture (taken the day he was first detained), but when I met him, his hair were long and down-below his shoulders. I am not really sure how long it takes for hair to grow that long, I am guessing a couple of years or so.

Soon after I was taken into custody, I immediately signed a document wherein I agreed to a ‘speedy’ removal, in exchange for waiving all my rights to appeal my removal from the country and my detention until I was actually removed. When I asked to pay for my own airplane ticket, I was rudely answered that would not necessary because “They have the money.”

My ‘speedy’ removal involved over fifty-two days in some kind of “concentration camp” located behind treacherous snake-ridden swamps, alligator-infested moats, miles of barbed wire, under the watch of armed guards and countless security cameras, called the ‘Krome Processing Center’ and the better part of another month in the so-called Broward ‘Transitional’ Center, or BTC. BTC is the showcase private prison run the the GEO Corporation, formerly known as the Wackenhut Group, and as a result BTC is more like a dumpy suburban hotel run by corporate idiots, but a prison, nonetheless. They say that places like Krome are not prisons. However, you get there with handcuffs, if you are lucky only your hands but I heard people who was brought there wearing one of those chains that bind you hands and feet together, which some call ‘shackles’, similar to those worn by African slaves brought to work on American plantations, generations ago.

In other cases, people are awakened in their residences in the middle of the night, handcuffed and brought to Krome. A buddy of mine held at BTC told me that he was taken while at work, they handcuffed him there, and he was led out between his boss, his colleagues, and other people in the office, with them doubtlessly pondering what his crime might be.

They know where you are: that car parked outside your house and following you for weeks was most likely the FBI or someone else sent by the Dept. of Homeland Security. Otherwise, how would they know where you work, at what time you get up in the morning and even where you shop and who you had for dinner the night before?

Once into custody, they take everything you have, your wallet with your money, any papers you may have with you, your cell phone, all your clothes and they give you a uniform, the colour of the uniform depends on the level of your “crime”, you could be blue, orange or red. I was blue, and I was often reminded by officers how lucky I was to be blue, though, the three colors are all treated in the same way, nothing but criminals. From that moment, you don’t have a name anymore, you will be called by the name of the country where you are from, and the last three digits of your “A” number.

You can receive visits from relatives or friends on week-ends, you have to fill up papers and wait for them to be approved beforehand. (In BTC you have to fill up papers even to buy a phone card or to buy soap or toothpaste and wait a number of days before you can get those).

At the end of the hyper-surveillanced visitation, before bringing you back to your dormitory, they take you into the outside restroom, where you strip naked, before they inspect you: “squat, lift your testicles, cough, open your mouth.” Some people avoided to have relatives visiting, so not to go through that degrading process every time, at the end of the one hour of smiles or tears. And they still say that those places are not prisons.

In Krome, they pat-down and frisk you a number of times a day, basically every time you go from here-to-there, (and always escorted by one or more officers, i.e. from the dormitory to the cafeteria and vice versa, from the dormitory to the PHS and vice versa, etc.)

In Krome, I was sharing a dormitory with a large number of other people from all over the world, a multi-toilets bathroom not separated by walls or doors, so while you are brushing your teeth, other people may be sitting on the toilets close to you, some more showering, and a long line of people waiting for the next available toilet or sink or shower, all in the same room. You better stop thinking about hygiene and privacy or you will drive yourself crazy. There are several cameras in the dormitory observing you 24 hours, and two officers every eight hours sitting there, and you only go out on recreation one hour or so a day under surveillance of a number of officers, and that’s if doesn’t rain. Still they tell you that you are lucky to be there and not in a “real” prison.

The telephones work only with specific five, ten, and twenty-dollars phone cards that you can only buy once a week from an authorized vendor who comes to the dormitory at a certain time of the day. If you don’t have any money, your only hope is that one of the detainees lends you his phone card so you can at least make one phone call to your loved ones or they will never know what happened to you and where you are, for a long time. I once bought an used phone card from another detainee, ten dollars for a seven-minutes-left phone card.

I would not suggest to waste time and money to call your country’s Consulate in America, since usually they totally ignore you, while at other times they reply to your twenty messages left in their answer machine, with one of those standard letters listing for you only the things that they cannot do for you, since apparently, they can do absolutely nothing. It happened to a British Citizen: his consulate suggested to him to take full advantage of being detainee in America ‘to learn the English language’. Now, either in Krome or BTC, I would suggest to learn Spanish, Creole, Chinese, maybe Russian or Italian, but I would never suggest To anyone to learn English there, and especially to a British man.

If you are anxious or nervous (for God’s sake, you are basically in prison for who knows how long, and you haven’t killed, robbed or committed any felonies, so how should you feel?) they sometimes put you on Klonopin (Clonopin) of the clonazepam family, a highly addictive and potent anticonvulsant, amnestic and anxiolytic, also often given to people to help get over their raging cocaine or other drugs habits. A doctor gives it to you, so you take it and you trust him. You feel relaxed and sleepy all day, what a blessing! The day they deport you or they move you somewhere else, they suddenly stop giving it to you. Almost two months later, I am still dealing with some of the horrible side effects of that drug. I am glad I wasn’t there the 27th of July to see you one more time, Mr. Doctor.

One of the most bizarre ironies is that almost all of the detention officers in the so-called ‘processing centres’ were themselves immigrants who acquired residency by various means; they are now working in jobs where they themselves are detaining new immigrants, and getting bonuses for catching “illegal aliens”

In one detention centre scenario, imagine a young, newly-naturalized, Haitian officer, paid around twenty or so dollars per hour, writing down detainee information with one hand, while peeling a baked potato with her lavishly-decorated nails with the other hand, and at the same time checking on her young daughter over the phone, with speaker activated, they were having rice for dinner, we, the twenty-six detainees moved that same day from Krome to BTC, all heard that.

The other officer cannot spell ‘anxiety’ and has no idea about what ‘Roman Catholic’ means, but he is a nice, smiling guy, who will never be rude to you, and he doesn’t treat you like dirt, so it doesn’t really matter.

The “You-don’t-know-how-important-I-am” officer in BTC doesn’t deserve to be mentioned, but the question remains, who do you think you are? Now, I remember; a native Peruvian supervisor, who probably got in during Reagan’s amnesty in the 1980’s. What I know for sure is that, to hold your officer’s job, being smart is optional.

The “lady” officer, I believe Puerto Rican, usually at Krome’s PHS, who doesn’t say a line without including at least three “f” words. Very classy, Ms. Officer, it says a lot about what kind of “woman” you are, and what level of education you received. You also confirmed that education is also an optional to do what you do, and yes, we all know why we are/were there, stop asking that inane question. What we don’t know is why you are not one of us.

The Jamaican Lady officer, the one who everybody hates, including a number of officers, the one who really believes in what she is doing. Every time before sitting on her desk, checks bed by bed to see if you have washed and put to dry one of your two boxers-underwear around the bed. If she finds it, she will throw them away, and you will have only one left. I still laugh out loud, when I remember the scene with her tug-of-war over the Chinese guy’s underwear. That was priceless!

God Bless the Dominican Officer for making me laugh, the Cuban Lady officer for treating me like an human being and reminding me that soon it would be over, the young officer for admitting that he took the job only because he needed the “good money” that it pays, and the nice Haitian lady officer for caring and talking to me -- I too hope that Hillary will be the next President of the United States, America deserves a smart president.

The temperature in Krome’s dormitories is kept to 68/70 degrees, the officers wear a jacket, the detainee a short sleeve “shirt” and he is prohibited to get into the bed for warmth during the day. Along with a Syrian detainee, I used to sit close to the retractable steel door, warmed up by the outside sun.

Nobody tells you what happens or where you are going and for how long. You wake up the next morning and your next-bed buddy, the one you have been talking, crying and sharing with, had just silently ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night. What a horrible feeling! For some reason, it brought back to my mind what I read about the Gestapo.

They wake you up usually around 3:30 am, you don’t know if you will be finally deported (I have never thought that someday I would wish to be deported from the U.S., but I did, their mistreatment finally forces you to you hate the U.S.) or moved somewhere else, until you actually reach the destination. And even then, they may sometimes bring you back to Krome or BTC after hours of waiting in a windowless, odorific airport room with no windows, because the officer during the long weeks or months of your detention, “had no time” to check, or just missed your expired passport.

More than fifty days later, on the Fourth of July I was still detained. Lunch time, the cafeteria was decorated with small American flags and balloons, somebody brought a stereo playing Patriotic songs. They even served half corn for lunch and a couple of sausages. Definitely, whoever organized that, has ‘great’ sense of humour.

The immigration attorneys deserve a separate article, it would take too long to explain how they unscrupulously take your money until the last penny, and how they do actually nothing for you.

My detention up until my deportation was unnecessary and a form of draconican ‘over-kill,’ not to mention a tremendous waste of tax-payer money. Nothing was accomplished by detaining me for almost two months after it was determined that I would be deported to my homeland in Europe. This was either gross incompetence by the Immigration bureaucracy, or a back-handed form of punitive revenge against me for violating a ‘technical’ point of American immigration law, and being stupid and honest enough to get caught, or some combination of this and more. Because even though I signed for my voluntary deportation the very first day, and even though I held a ‘current’, valid passport, they still imprisoned me there for fifty-two long days. Why? How much the immigration vendors receive from the government per day, for each detainee? Could it be true what a officer told me “places like Krome are a profit-making business.” And somebody still says that President Bush did not create new jobs!
God bless (and have mercy upon) America!

Indian Sikh on Aug 09, 2006 at 18:53:30 said:

Cheema was a terrorist. Now, it is upon you how you want to treat a terrorist. Come and see how many people suffered because of terrorist Cheema. Meet the people whose relatives were killed by terrorists in Punjab. Human rights are for human beings, not for inhuman terrorists.

John O'Brien on Aug 08, 2006 at 12:49:01 said:

I think that it is about time Cheema was sent back to India. Do you know how much it has cost the taxpayers to house this guy? The bleeding heart that "dropped to tears" disgusts me to no end. Cheema apparently was a danger to our country or else they would not have kept him incarcerated. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is a very liberal bunch and for them to not have freed him shows just how dangerous he is. Get a grip, either we fight terrorists or they rule us.

AsianResource Gallery on Aug 08, 2006 at 08:23:44 said:

greetings,

Just wanted to say thanks so much for the insightful and timely article and the series -- and want to invite the editor and all those in the area, to an art opening reception this thursday, which addresses parallel issues, on detention and disappearances since 9/11 in the South Asian community:

ONE NATION UNDER SURVEILLANCE
reimaging the south asian community
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
artwork, performances and film screening
FREE to the community
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Asian Resource Gallery
310 Eighth St @ Harrison
Oakland Chinatown
6-8pm Opening Nite
drinks =-= food =-= performances
9-5pm every other weekday



or
http://www.revoluxindesigns.com/ARG/ARG_OneNationWEB.jpg

Sonny BEE on Aug 07, 2006 at 08:45:08 said:

I absoulutely dropped to tears reading this story, I cannot believe what my country has become In every sense of the word. I knew sept, marked the end to everything we were about I am deeply sorry Singh and his family thought they had a chance here, for our libertys and freedoms are being chipped away with every story of mistreaded human being. From the middle east and our bullsh§t way of pushing democracy, to the laws passed under our noses, to the detainment of humans cagged til the government decides to free, no justification but the word terrior,, the america i was raised to believe in is no more, and I am sorry for what it has become, its an absoulute discrace, no wonder the hatred of us has spread;